ABSTRACT
In the last chapter, I argued that human agents’ structural presumptuousness – their drive to preserve their self-understanding – and not egoism or altruism, offers us the key to human nature. Human interaction must therefore be described as the working out of this need in an interpersonal context – rather than as the pursuit or renunciation of individual advantage. As Hume observed, we care about, and take an interest in, others’ personal characteristics and attitudes – toward both ourselves and other things – even when these do not bear on our material well-being. The tough-minded framework cannot explain what animates this interest. At best, the tough-minded can address our interest in social recognition by construing it as an expedient to individual self-esteem, the transferring of a pleasurable sensation. But this misrepresents our actual experience of others and their attitudes. These do not merely give and take things to and from us, but do something to us, fundamentally impinging upon the nature of our self-understanding.
